The following is an excerpt.
For the first time, researchers have successfully engineered a strain of baker’s yeast capable of spewing out malaria drugs on an industrial scale. The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi has already begun brewing the microbes and announced plans to generate 70 million doses this year.
The advance is the result of a 10-year odyssey in synthetic biology, the wholesale engineering of an organism’s genetic and metabolic system for practical purposes (see “Biology’s Master Programmers”). Amyris, the biotech startup that engineered the yeast strain, is also developing microbes to produce fragrances and other high-value chemicals.
Read the full article here: Microbes Can Mass-Produce Malaria Drug
